The story of how JPMorgan, Goldman and the rest of the Too Big To Fails and Prosecutes, cornered, monopolized and became a full-blown cartel - with the Fed's explicit blessing - in the physical commodity market is nothing new to regular readers: to those new to this story, we suggest reading of our story from June 2011 (over two and a half years ago), "Goldman, JP Morgan Have Now Become A Commodity Cartel As They Slowly Recreate De Beers' Diamond Monopoly." That, or Matt Taibbi's latest article written in his usual florid and accessible style, in which he explains how the "Vampire Squid strikes again" courtesy of the "loophole that destroyed the world" to wit: "it would take half a generation – till now, basically – to understand the most explosive part of the bill, which additionally legalized new forms of monopoly, allowing banks to merge with heavy industry. A tiny provision in the bill also permitted commercial banks to delve into any activity that is "complementary to a financial activity and does not pose a substantial risk to the safety or soundness of depository institutions or the financial system generally." Complementary to a financial activity. What the hell did that mean?... Fifteen years later, in fact, it now looks like Wall Street and its lawyers took the term to be a synonym for ruthless campaigns of world domination."

Some key excerpts:

Today, banks like Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs own oil tankers, run airports and control huge quantities of coal, natural gas, heating oil, electric power and precious metals. They likewise can now be found exerting direct control over the supply of a whole galaxy of raw materials crucial to world industry and to society in general, including everything from food products to metals like zinc, copper, tin, nickel and, most infamously thanks to a recent high-profile scandal, aluminum. And they're doing it not just here but abroad as well: In Denmark, thousands took to the streets in protest in recent weeks, vampire-squid banners in hand, when news came out that Goldman Sachs was about to buy a 19 percent stake in Dong Energy, a national electric provider. The furor inspired mass resignations of ministers from the government's ruling coalition, as the Danish public wondered how an American investment bank could possibly hold so much influence over the state energy grid.

...

The motive for the Kochs, or anyone else, to hoard a commodity like oil can be almost beautiful in its simplicity. Basically, a bank or a trading company wants to buy commodities cheap in the present and sell them for a premium as futures. This trade, sometimes called "arbitraging the contango," works best if the cost of storing your oil or metals or whatever you're dealing with is negligible – you make more money off the futures trade if you don't have to pay rent while you wait to deliver.

So when financial firms suddenly start buying oil tankers or warehouses, they could be doing so to make bets pay off, as part of a speculative strategy – which is why the banks' sudden acquisitions of metals-storage companies in 2010 is so noteworthy.

These were not minor projects. The firms put high-ranking executives in charge of these operations. Goldman's acquisition of Metro was the project of Isabelle Ealet, the bank's then-global commodities chief. (In a curious coincidence commented upon by several sources for this story, many of Goldman's most senior officials, including CEO Lloyd Blankfein and president Gary Cohn, started their careers in Goldman's commodities division.)

Then there are the political connections:

In 2010, a decade after the Rich pardon, Holder was attorney general, but under Barack Obama, and two Rich-created firms, along with two banks that have been major donors to the Democratic Party, all made moves to buy up metals warehouses. In near simultaneous fashion, Goldman, Chase, Glencore and Trafigura bought companies that control warehouses all over the world for the LME, or London Metals Exchange. The LME is a privately owned exchange for world metals trading. It's the world's primary hub for determining metals prices and also for trading metals-based futures, options, swaps and other instruments.

"If they were just interested in collecting rent for metals storage, they'd have bought all kinds of warehouses," says Manal Mehta, the founder of Sunesis Capital, a hedge fund that has done extensive research on the banks' forays into the commodities markets. "But they seemed to focus on these official LME facilities."

The JPMorgan deal seemed to be in direct violation of an order sent to the bank by the Fed in 2005, which declared the bank was not authorized to "own, operate, or invest in facilities for the extraction, transportation, storage, or distribution of commodities." The way the Fed later explained this to the Senate was that the purchase of Henry Bath was OK because it considered the acquisition of this commodities company kosher within the context of a larger sale that the Fed was cool with – "If the bulk of the acquisition is a permissible activity, they're allowed to include a small amount of impermissible activities."

What's more, according to LME regulations, no warehouse company can also own metal or make trades on the exchange. While they may have been following the letter of the law, they were certainly violating the spirit: Goldman preposterously seems to have engaged in all three activities simultaneously, changing a hat every time it wanted to switch roles. It conducted its metal trades through its commodities subsidiary J. Aron, and then put Metro, its warehouse company, in charge of the storage, and according to industry experts, Goldman most likely owned some metal, though the company has remained vague on the subject.

If you're wondering why the LME would permit a seemingly blatant violation of its own rules, a good place to start would be to look at who owned the LME at the time. Although it eventual­ly sold itself to a Hong Kong company in 2012, in 2010 the LME was owned by a consortium of banks and financial companies. The two largest shareholders? Goldman and JPMorgan Chase.

Humorously, another was Koch Metals (2.32 percent), a commodities concern that's part of the Koch brothers' empire. The Kochs have been caught up in their own commodity-manipulation schemes, including an episode in 2008, in which they rented out huge tankers and sed them to store excess oil offshore essentially as floating warehouses, taking cheap oil out of available supply and thereby helping to drive up energy prices. Additionally, some banks have been accused of similar oil-hoarding schemes.

And then there is of course Blythe, who is now looking for a new job precisely as a result of the cartel story:

Chase's own head of commodities operations, Blythe Masters – an even more famed Wall Street figure, sometimes described as the inventor of the credit default swap – admitted that her company's warehouse interests weren't just a casual thing. "Just being able to trade financial commodities is a serious limitation because financial commodities represent only a tiny fraction of the reality of the real commodity exposure picture," she said in 2010.

Loosely translated, Masters was saying that there was a limited amount of money to be made simply trading commodities in the traditional legal manner. The solution? "We need to be active in the underlying physical commodity markets," she said, "in order to understand and make prices."

We need to make prices. The head of Chase's commodities division actually said this, out loud, and it speaks to both the general unlikelihood of God's existence and the consistently low level of competence of America's regulators that she was not immediately zapped between the eyebrows with a thunderbolt upon doing so. Instead, the government sat by and watched as a curious phenomenon developed at all of these new bank-owned warehouses, in the aluminum markets in particular.

Finally, the big picture:

[T]he potential for wide-scale manipulation and/or new financial disasters is only part of the nightmare that this new merger of banking and industry has created. The other, perhaps even darker problem involves the new existential dangers both to the environment and to the stability of the financial system. Long before Goldman and Chase started buying up metals warehouses, for instance, Morgan Stanley had already bought up a substantial empire of physical businesses – electricity plants in a number of states, a firm that trades in heating oil, jet fuels, fertilizers, asphalt, chemicals, pipelines and a global operator of oil tankers.

How long before one of these fully loaded monster ships capsizes, and Morgan Stanley becomes the next BP, not only killing a gazillion birds and sea mammals off some unlucky country's shores but also taking the financial system down with them, as lawsuits plunge the company into bankruptcy with Lehman-style repercussions? Morgan Stanley's CEO, James Gorman, even admitted how risky his firm's new acquisitions were last year, when he reportedly told staff that a hypothetical oil spill was "a risk we just can't take."

The regulators are almost worse. Remember the 2008 collapse happened when government bodies like the Fed, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision – whose entire expertise supposedly revolves around monitoring the safety and soundness of financial companies – somehow missed that half of Wall Street was functionally bankrupt.

Now that many of those financial companies have been bailed out, those same regulators who couldn't or wouldn't smell smoke in a raging fire last time around are suddenly in charge of deciding if companies like Morgan Stanley are taking out enough insurance on their oil tankers, or if banks like Goldman Sachs are properly handling their uranium deposits.

"The Fed isn't the most enthusiastic regulator in the best of times," says Brown. "And now we're asking them to take this on?"

Read the full story here (Rolling Stone link), or alternatively for those curious, here is a presentation highlighting all the key aspects of the aluminum price manipulation story by the big banks.

How much of the run up in LP gas was due to winter and how much was due to JP Morgue? In other words, how much paper did they trade to run the price up? I bet they bought all kinds of contracts and never used an ounce of the LP they bought.

If our politicians had any brains or balls, they would make banks a place where people keep their money for safekeeping. They shouldn't be allowed to invest in all kinda of shit with someone else's money. If that means banker bonuses go away, so be it.

"If the bulk of the acquisition is a permissible activity, they're allowed to include a small amount of impermissible activities."

Gotta love it.

(In a curious coincidence commented upon by several sources for this story, many of Goldman's most senior officials, including CEO Lloyd Blankfein and president Gary Cohn, started their careers in Goldman's commodities division.)

I think the point of the article is that the trading of commodities is no longer a market. You have to get past the writer's breathless prose to understand that. I don't know why this guy writes like some local weather reporter breaking news, but he does.

The deeper realities, Beam Me Up Scotty, are that practically the only successful and surviving politicians are banksters' puppets, performing for the masses of muppets, because the banksters have been applying the methods of organized crime to the political processes persistently. Their basic methods of organized crime were bribery, intimidation and assassination of those who could not be bribed or intimidated. After doing that systematically long enough, there are almost no politicians left who are not the banksters' puppets. Almost all of the successful and surviving politicians have already been, metaphorically speaking, lobotomized and castrated.

Oh I get that. I just wish there were some politicians who didn't give a damn about winning the next election and started telling people the TRUTH. Instead they just tell people what they want to hear so they can get their vote because nothing is more important to them than winning the next election. And I know thats all real old news to you and everyone else on ZH.

"I just wish there were some politicians who didn't give a damn about winning the next election and started telling people the TRUTH."

Me too! However, as you know, no politicians that do that have a fair chance against the almost 90% domination of the "news" by a handful of huge corporations. (One only has to look at Ron Paul to see that!)

Basically, every politician who is "practical" compromises so much with the Huge Lies, because that is what works for them. As I am sure you already know, Beam Me Up Scotty, "telling people the Truth" is the least successful political strategy, while telling people the lies that they want to hear is the most successful political strategy.

The way that professional politicians work today is that they discover the lies that people want to hear, and then that is what they say. After all, those politicians are under no obligation to do what they said they would do, but rather, typically do the opposite to whatever they said while campaigning (other than keeping promises which are sufficiently trivial that the Truth about them makes no significant difference.)

There's only one thing that needs to be understood: Obama has praised Dimon several times and referred to him as the "banker's banker". Dimon has been given card blanche to behave in whatever manner he wishes. The same is true for all the large banks. This is fascism at its worst.

Obama has praised Dimon several times and referred to him as the "banker's banker"...

He and his sidekick also referred to the Honorable Jon Corzine as the architect of our stellar recovery too. Just in time for him to take control of MF and gut it in his spare time. The taper will end only when thescribes and pharisees have no more equities to consume with their "reserve status" scrip.

It is important to remember that it is Eric Holder who is chums with all these Wall Street banksters. There will be no prosecutions whilst he's in office. The fact that Masters was blocked from getting into the henhouse is a miracle in itself.

A key point. We live in a post moral-hazard world. These banks are essentially recreating the conditions of 2006/2007 in new and interesting ways, and like the debt ceiling debate, not a thing is done to fix the underlying...

But we'll get to crisis point, and there will be another "prevent tanks on the street moment" and more bailouts and t bill issues and printing.

And when that happens, if the American people don't march by the millions, this country deserves to burn to the fucking ground,

Beam me up Scotty, remember this one - Walter Luken testifying to congress on 9/11/2008

"There is no evidenc that Speculation played a part in the run up of oil prices"

I'm sure there are plenty of readers here on ZH that have followed oil prices for a long time. In the lead up to the Iraqi invasion (read foreplay for the masses) it was the Iraqi oil that was supposed to pay for the inconvenience of bombing their country. Once the conquest began, oil prices actually went down - Supply & Demand as the spigot was about to be opened. Howver once we got a piece of the action, it's been game on ever since. YMMV.

The only entity that can sustain a monopoly is government and the cartels it supports. Without government, there are no monopolies. Period. Ergo, no need for anti-trust laws. Except against government, of course.

Laws to protect safety and property seem to be some good agreements. Many of the things going on in the financial industry fall under the definition of theft. If you buy that, then you can buy the idea that not a whole lot of laws are needed, but they do need to really be enforced. We need to get clear about what theft is and we should be good to go.

Hello Folks, I am looking for some experts to make Documentary on NETFLIX Ponzi scheme to reveal how Nexus scam gang Led by Goldman Sachs/Morgan Stanley and insiders have looted over $15 Billion since 2010. Netflix runs out of cash three times and shocking part is same scam Gang loot and same gang funds for fraud loot. ENRON?WORLDCOM scams put to shame by this nexus cam gang. Full protection provided by Obama & Eric Holder to this nexus scam gang.

Since the taper announcement of $10 B which was applied in Jan and $20 B applied in Feb isn't even visible yet in the data set...what oh what caused this halt in the monetary base and wonder what Jan and Feb will look like? Reverse Repo's taking out nearly everything QE is putting in even b4 QE was tapered... Jan - March likely to show shrinking overall monetary base...Stawk bears (if any are still alive and have any money left) are about to be rewarded until Janet makes her "crazy Ivan" u-turn and if all changes on a dime

And since the change commodities (energy, metals, softs) all taking off...as if this is a head fake for Janet to show how critical moar and moar QE is to the "growth" of the US economy. Janet gonna fix it all...make all the pain that bad man BB brought on with his taper, destorying main street americans by stopping hyper-monetization. Janet gonna make it rain this summer.

in '13 ETF's / Comex provided 1000 of the 4700 tons of supply (or 21%) to meet the record demand...so far in '14 Chinese demand @ new record highs in Jan, India looking to get back in the gold biz, and now the ETF's are net buyers...GLD as the largest sold 500 tons last year but so far this year adding 10 tons...that means somewhere there is maybe a 25% shortage of supply vs. demand...funny the price of gold would rise in this circumstance...even more curious this massive, obvious shortage isn't causing a huge short squeeze, seriously curious

Oh they will find a work around to that. They will just own a business that's owns a business that owns physical commodities. No one will even know who the real "owners" are. There will probably be a few empty "office buildings" in the middle of nowhere that these so called "businesses" operate out of.

You're describing the current modus operandi, which is why they are now going to actually sell the physical businesses.The thing is, they’ll still be allowed to trade the financial derivatives.So they are currently manipulating prices in those spaces up, to sell the physical side at a huge premium, while at the same time shorting the financial derivatives of those said commodities, so that when the world wakes up and realizes that all shortages/curtailments were manufactured through bank collusion, the banks profit on the back end as prices collapse.

Only when it affects their idea of a utopian system of spend, spend, spend and be happy. No one is happy having to spend more to stay warm or keep the lights on, and that's when the government will step in, hence the banks being proactive and selling the physical portfolio businesses.

we're not doomed. nothing comes out of it because it was kosher. see? you have to read the bold print. that makes it all a1 ok with the cool kosher people

... it considered the acquisition of this commodities company kosher within the context of a larger sale that the Fed was cool with – "If the bulk of the acquisition is a permissible activity, they're allowed to include a small amount of impermissible activities."

How long before one of these fully loaded monster ships capsizes, and Morgan Stanley becomes the next BP, not only killing a gazillion birds and sea mammals off some unlucky country's shores but also taking the financial system down with them...

Um, the author thinks that would be bad? The whole financial system going down in flames seems like the only solution to me.

The same folks that are directly connected to the money supply, which powers the global economy (reserve currency) including politics (who incidentally happen to write laws and regulate said folks), hold savings and pensions for millions, finance virtually everything, etc. are "for profit" companies that seek to maximize their returns for personal gain (as is the case with most private firms).

Taibbi, like ZH, has been one of the few voices in the wilderness and he's been raising the alarm since Glass-Steagall was neutered in 1999.

I'm surprised that his car hasn't accelerated out of control into a big tree and gone up in a fireball. But then, he's probably smart enough to drive an old beater rather than a fly-by-wire suicide wagon. He just needs to stay away from nail guns.

Bullshit. MT is a political hyper-partisan, as evidenced by how he can switch from JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs to Koch Industries, without even pausing for breath. A year from now, Matt will be telling us that these are all good reasons why we should vote for Hillary Clinton.

Matt Taibbi is definitely Koch-sucking faggot. There is plenty of material to write countless lengthy articles about either the influence of big money in the US political process, or the underhanded tactics employed by large industrial concerns in pursuit of profit. But including that many mentions of Kock in an article about TBTF BANKER corruption is just gay, and me leads to believe Matt either seriously wants some Koch Koch, or he's taking a lot of Soros Koch. But journalistic integrity is a bit above both Matt Taibbi's pay grade and his intellectual capacity, but it certainly generates revenues for Matt's Massas as Rolling Stone, and MOAR PROFIT is really what's all about. To bad he probably doesn't get joke...

Sorry- busy day (but there will be plenty of red arrows for us to share), I'm trying to help a farmer get some money so he can buy some machinery from me and then hire a bunch of people to operate it... but the scum bankers seem to prefer the "risk-free" Yellin Payolla Scam, instead of financing job creation.

No, there are plenty of other corrupt energy complex firms that I much prefer doing business with (and some of them are actually the really corrupt ones, you know when the ex-CEO is on trail for a felony, while the current CEO is committing the exact same felony his predecessor is on trial for... but the devil you know is often safer than the one you don't know). My impression though is that Koch Industries seems to fall in the limp-dick half-assed loser-corner end of the spectrum of the big money bloodsport industrialist club members, but they are certainly not bankers.

However, I detest anyone trying to outright purchase any national political process.

My disgust for the Kochs is both ideological and evidentiary, my disgust for Soros is the same, but with a personal twist added, since he once showed up to piss in my pool and fuck over some people I was trying to help. He also declared open financial war on some people I respect solely for financial gain, and imposed great cost the victimized societies. Soros demonstrates of the wisdom of the other school of anti-Satan thought - avoid the fucking devil at all costs.

Matt Taibbi, however, is partisan whore selling pushing substance lacking anti-establishment product for the Rolling Stone arm of Wenner Media (as opposed to substance lacking US weekly or Men's Journal arms). If actually he demonstrated a thorough understanding of finance and cut out irrelevant crap that isn't even relevant to the story he is trying to push he might be more readable, but by including it he is pushing an agenda, not the actual story which is horrific enough as it is.

Happy Valentine's Day from central Europe, where we make the Vatican look a bunch of prude choirboys (we just do it more discretely after we grow up), but the flagrant fag lobby isn't about tolerance, it's about the fascist imposition of values (just like much smaller extremist wing of the Bible Beater lobby) - both which run counter to the inalienable right of SELF-DETERMINATION OF PEOPLES (inalienable, except when Mario's investment of political capital is at stake, of course).

Another cocksucker popular on ZH is John Perkins, who rails about NWO DFIs attaching strings to questionable financing arrangements to promote strategic objectives, but his hypocritical ass is remarkably tight lipped when those NWO DFIs are attaching "(im)moral" strings to questionable financing to promote strategic objectives.

The people of San Francisco should have the right to self determination just as the people of Nigeria should. But when the Iranians kill homosexuals the schlong sucking defenders of the Shia Ayatollas on ZH shut their supposedly libertarian traps, just as Hiltery Clinton does when the Saudis kill homosexuals while she's simultaneously packing the Paki embassy full of fudge packers.

It's not the homos I'm hung up on, it's the hypocrites- and they need to be called (or dragged) out of the closet.

As long as the 'unwashed' (poor+uninformed) feudal masses have bread, dope and hope, no open or mass revolts will take place. Only when they get truly desperate and have nothing left to lose, will they revolt.

Ancient and Modern/Current history confirms this time and again. As long as we see unrest and wars in other parts of the world, we in the USSA either have time or can delude ourselves that we do.

"The Beginning of The End" might happen as Michael Snyder (author, ZH writer) writes about, but I doubt it. Right now it's looking more like a USD takeover of EM currencies and politics: If the EMs are too weak and desperate to join the BRICs, the showdown remains between the USD+EUR vs. RBL+CNY. Place your bets.